****UPDATE: I’m keeping this post at the top for a couple of days because the photos are so awesome. New stuff will show up underneath. ****

Come, let us dispense with tiresome talk of the 2010 Senate race (“Will Jim Holt get in? When will Jim Holt get in? Is Jim Holt in yet? Has anyone talked to Jim Holt?” “Jim Holt…call me!” “Jim! Holt!”) and the dreary back and forth over Obamacare to focus on the things that matter most to the Arkansas Project readership.

And so here is Natalie White, a 26-year-old pharmaceutical sales rep from Van Buren, who took home the $1 million dollar prize on the CBS reality show “Survivor,” which means she is now better funded than all of the candidates in the GOP Senate primary. Ha ha! Zing! See how I brought it back around there?

More Natalie at the jump.

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It’s amateur hour for the Republican Party of Arkansas, which has cranked up their moral dudgeon to “high” in response to a throw-away comment from the state Democrats’ executive director in a recent news story.

Here’s the background: On Tuesday, former GOP Rep. Michael Lamoureux won a special election to be the next state senator for District 4. Asked for response, state Democrats offered this to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Mike Wickline :

Mariah Hatta, executive director of the state Democratic Party, said she hopes Lamoureux “will work across party lines for the good of our people and avoid the hyper-partisanship cult of Republican legislators, mostly in the House, who would like to make the Capitol in Little Rock more like the one in Washington.”

That “cult” bit didn’t go down too well with GOP chair Doyle Webb and House  minority leader Bryan King, who issued hyperventilating statements declaring, in effect, “We are not a cult.”

OK, let’s review some elementary political communication tactics, such as, when someone makes a charge against you, you DON”T REPEAT THE CHARGE. Why? Because it simply reinforces the idea in people’s minds, rather than refuting it.  Here, let’s let Ryan Sager explain how that works:

People use “perceived familiarity” with a supposed “fact” as a mental shortcut to judge its truth. Thus, if they hear “X isn’t true,” over time they simply remember “X.” So, for instance, if you’re the Democrats during the health care debate, you don’t want to get stuck repeating, “There are no death panels.” What people remember from that is, “Man, there’s sure a lot of controversy over these ‘death panels’ I hear so much about.”

Well put, Ryan Sager! So when people hear Republicans leaders protest, “We are not a cult!”, they don’t share the deep sense of offense. They’re more likely to simply remember the nouns: “GOP=Cult.” (If you’re running for office in the coming year, feel free to clip ‘n’ save this little lesson. It may come in handy when you have to run a little campaign damage control of your own.)

Now, Hatta’s comment was dumb — over-the-top and needlessly provocative-for-the-sake-of-being-provocative. But the Republican response, purposely elevating the throw-away smear buried in a newspaper story into a Big Issue, is worse, because they allowed themselves to be provoked, to no useful end.

It may be too much to ask the state’s GOP leaders to think like professional communication strategists. But at the very least, they might refrain from embarrassing themselves with tactics that are self-defeating and monumentally retarded.

UPDATE: No sooner do I hit “publish” on this piece than a news release arrives from GOP Senate candidate Conrad Reynolds, taking a breather from not raising money for his campaign, pushing the same goddamn lines. This. This is the hill they’ve chosen to stand and fight upon. Attention Democrats: Give Mariah Hatta a fat bonus! Full Reynolds statement at jump.

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The Republican Party of Arkansas hosted its straw poll for the 2010 Senate race today, with seven of the announced candidates participating. And in a way, I guess you could say that all of these guys are winners. But in another, more accurate way, most of them are losers and Gilbert Baker is the winner, since he won.

More from Roby Brock at Talk Business, who offers summaries of the hopefuls’ speeches at his Political Buzz blog.